A demo of Salieri's bar has been made and can be downloaded. This guy is trying to apparently contact 2K Czech or Take 2 Interactive to see if he can get the okay of making this into a real thing as he plans on remaking Mafia in its entirety, and he seems really enthusiastic about developing it. He said the project won't go much further unless he can get an answer from them.
But what do you guys think about it?

Although I'd love to see a remastered version of this game in an engine like Unreal4, I unfortunately see little chance of this project getting finished.

First of all, my own experience with 2K Czech is that they disassociate themselves from the first game. The license now has been passed on to H13, which is now the developer responsible for the Mafia title. If 2KC had little connection with M1, imagine how completely absent it may be for H13.
Take 2 is still the IP holder, but yeah, good luck trying to contact them about stuff like this. Especially for an independent developer. There have been a lot of 3rd party game remasters in the past that was being worked on, and pretty much all of them got sued by the publisher. Regardless of being a free game/mod. Publishers are interested in money, not fan service.

And secondly, it's the scope. The demo is just a quick model of Salieri's bar with some default shaders that UE4 provides. A lot of people can make that over the weekend. From what I can see, the developer still has to improve the modelling as well, as the proportions seem off, and some models don't seem to do the engine justice, detail wise.
Creating a fully fletched next-generation rendition of an entire city, interiors and all, is something completely different. It takes a lot of work to make even a decent looking static city that doesn't drive your PC into a crawl. And it takes a lot more to populate it with NPC's, developing game mechanics, not to mention missions, animations, cutscenes and a proper sound design as well.
Unless he gathers a decent sized team, chances of this getting anywhere are minimal. Just see how much work the Titanic mod is, and that is without any requirement of programming the AI and such myself.

I do hope that I'm wrong though, and that one day this turns out into one massive game. I've been wrong before with Honor and Glory, to which I said to the original developer (back when it was called Lost in the Darkness) that the idea would be unfeasible because of the high details they intended. Now look what that turned out to be._________________

I had doubts of this project too. Given how 2K Czech and perhaps even 2K Interactive themselves pretty much avoid anything related to Mafia 1. Its pretty sad that 2K would actually sue the fans that show their love for Mafia while they deliberately avoid it, and Hanger 13 made it even worse(greedy bastards! ). They should understand how much work and heart the fans put into these creations. This guy though already has people backing him up who are experienced scripters, modelers, and animators, so he has got a lot of help. He even set up a website for it about several months ago but I think he took it down.

I chatted with a developer on Steam from Warhorse Studios who are composed of former Mafia 1 developers, and he thought this looked really good. If life has taught me anything, its that anything is possible.

"When Hanger 13 went after the Mafia series, they did more damage than all the wars and hurricanes combined." lol

Rob says some wise things here. Also, it's bizarre how the remnants of Illusion Softworks (bar Dan Vavra) make such effort to distance themselves from Mafia: TCoLH, isn't it? Wouldn't your breakout IP hold a special place in your heart?

I wonder if the messy ten-year takeover by 2K soured feelings for the original devs. Back in 2001 IS signed the publishing deal with 2K and were licensed to use their recording studios for voice acting, but it seems they sold their soul when Mafia became big after release and 2K saw dollar signs. Now you can't find current mention of the core team anywhere; Lukas Kure, Vladimir Simunek, Jiri Pop, Roman Hladik, they all fell off the radar after the 2004 ports..

RETROACTIVE EDIT:

Hunter wrote:

My personal feeling is I don't see the point. If the graphics bug you so much, you don't like the game. If you upgrade the graphics a bunch, you have the same game.

Its possible the original devs including Vavra himself feels the same and believes the Mafia series deserves better than this, even though it is then again a closed chapter of his life since he moved on with Warhorse Studios and I doubt at this point he'll go back to the Mafia games. At least we have Kingdom Come Deliverance to look forward to.

Its doable... but it would take an enormous amount of work. I'm talking a decade, if a bunch of people work on it, daily. I have been dabbling with the idea, that instead of modding M1, maybe we should remake it, or make some sort of spiritual sequel. Heres a test. Its also in Unreal.

Building the whole city would be hard enough. The original game had a lot of buildings, which were basically made of pictures on planes of Dublin and Glasgow storefronts, buildings, etc, . There were a lot of unique storefronts, which in this case you would have to model brick by brick. Thats true with the rest of the models as well. Cars for example, had over 100 parts each (body,collisions,doors,triggers,generators, etc...) and there were a lot of cars.

Furthermore, you can expect absolutely NO SUPPORT from companies like Take2, 2K, etc. If they thought a remaster was doable, they would make it and make a ton of money off it. Also, they don't want you damaging their IP, in case they wanna use it in the future.

And here lies the problem. Theres so much work to do, that actually doing it right and complete, would require inve$tments. Most of us got jobs and families, and we do this as a hobby. There are yet no tools to rebuild a game from scratch, solo, unless you work daily for years and years, and are willing to invest some money. Not many people will sink that much time into something they will have to give away for free cause some game company isn't willing to brand its copyright to. So you either make Mafia Remastered for free, or make something different and are able to charge some money for it, getting back your investment and maybe a little extra. And they both take the same amount of work, which is A **** LOT.

Its almost tragic that Mafia doesn't get the love it deserves. At least from the devs. I feel like it would be much less time consuming if one were to port Mafia 1 vanilla to Unreal Engine like how it was ported to Unity last year and overhaul all of its graphics, models, etc since you have a base to work with. Though I presume thats not how things work and that I'm just dreaming too much